The first day in Norway was sunny and beautiful! Everyone was outside, lying on every available piece of sunny grass, meandering around the streets, or sitting at tables outside cafe's. The atmosphere was like a street fair. Young kids were playing chess with 2 foot tall pieces on the street. Breakdancers were strutting their stuff. Baby strollers were everywhere. Tulips and flowering trees were in bloom. Wow!
I joined them after getting a taxi to the hotel. I needed a taxi instead of taking the airport bus since I have 3 huge suitcases plus my carry on and computer bag. The TSA inspected 2 of the 3 suitcases, but they arrived just fine. I had a sore shoulder and elbow from hauling those overweight monsters! I should have everything I need for the first 3 months or so, if my calculations are correct.
Yesterday was probably 70 degrees, today is supposed to be cloudy and 60 degrees. I'll continue walking around getting to know the place.
Tom asked what is Schlumberger, anyway? Besides being my new employer, Schlumberger is an oil exploration company. They use a lot of geophysics and high-powered computing to make 3D maps of the subsurface so that people can decide whether there is likely to be oil or natural gas there. The part of it that I will be working at, WesternGeco, is in Bergen and Oslo, Norway. They build "streamers", which are 100 meter long cables full of sensors with GPS units. They are dragged behind exploration ships. The ships send out sound bursts which reflect off the floor of the sea, and also penetrate the surface and reflect off subsurface layers, too. The returning signals are captured by the streamers. All this data is fed back to a big computer on the ship which creates a 3D map of the geophysics of the subsurface. The oil companies can use these maps to figure out where to drill. Pretty cool, huh?
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